Valse Triste: A LETTER TO SIBELIUS
from
Marshall Walker
Dear Sibelius,
The dark brown wireless sat high on the sitting room mantelpiece, ruling the room. In
war or peace it told the only truth. BBC was the ubiquitous, infallible voice. British six
o’clock news, British cricket, British Churchill, British Dick Barton, Special Agent.
One afternoon the voice was wordless and foreign.Yours. The announcer called it ‘Symphony Number 3 in C’.
When the second movement came my arms reached up to catch and hold the tune.
Quickly, then, downstairs from the top-floor flat to the street to ‘play’ but really to be alone with
the music. I’d need to keep my eye on the time. I had no watch, but at 7.30 pm they’d hang a flag from
my bedroom window which would mean time for home and bed. Today ‘playing’ meant sitting on a wall
despoiled of its iron railings for the recent industries of war and hugging your new, ineffable tune.
The signal flapped at the window, a rusty Union Jack from wartime patriotisms. I must be prompt to avoid
reprimand. I began to climb the stairs and checked my mind. The tune had gone. Panic gripped my chest,
flushed sweat into my face. My arms were dead. I couldn’t go home like this, leaving the tune behind.
I looked back into the street. A man and woman were walking along the pavement, pleasantly arm in arm.
‘They’ll know,’ I thought.
I ducked back down to the street, stumbled up to them. They stopped, nonplussed, beginning to be wary.
‘Excuse me,’ I managed to say, ‘can you help me? I’ve lost, I mean
I can’t remember a magic thing that happened …’
They smiled implausibly, drew closer together, swerved past me and
quickened their steps. I went back into the maw of the tenement.
In bed I pulled the darkness round me and tried to think of a strategy. With hoarded pocket money I had bought
for 3/6d a Pelican Book called The Symphony. Bringing my bedside lamp under the quilt to muffle the brightness
so they wouldn’t know I was awake from tell-tale light under the bedroom door, I switched it on and took the
book from the bedside table. The chapter about you had commentaries on all seven of your symphonies. When I
looked up the second movement of Number 3 in C major it referred to Ex. 19 at the end of the chapter in a way
that I knew it was the magic theme. I fingered the stave, willing the hieroglyphs to enter my skin, tried to hum
the first notes but they didn’t sound in key and I couldn’t read anything from page to sound beyond the fifth note
though the quotation went on for another bar. Then I decided what to do and set the alarm clock for 6.30 am.
When she saw me so early in the kitchen my mother thought apocalypse. I nearly gagged on the
toast and tea, but got them down, muttered something about comparing homework with a classmate
before the start of school and ran down the stairs with The Symphony in my blazer pocket.
The school was in Woodend Drive. This morning it would never end; but at 8.20 by the school clock,
breathless from the run, I reached the door of the Music Room and lay in wait. Mr Adams arrived at
8.30 to collect whatever he needed before going down to the big hall to play the piano for Prayers.
‘Good morning,’ he said, surprised to find a lone pupil waiting for him so early in the day, ‘Why…?’
‘Excuse me, Mr Adams, please could you play this for me before Prayers. It’s very short,
but please play it because I can’t remember it properly. It’s very important and I really
don’t feel very well just now if you know what I mean because it’s gone away …’
Mr Adams held out his hand for the book, glanced at Ex. 19. There was no condescension in his smile.
‘Let’s go to the piano,’ he said.
He sat on the piano stool, put the book on the music stand and brought his long hands down to the
keys.Your spell was in the air again. It was in my brain and skin and my arms were warm and strong.
We went down to Prayers.
‘Thank you very much, Mr Adams, I …’
He said, ‘I know what you mean.’
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There you are in London, Sibelius, briskly exiting from Victoria railway station. It’s
February 1908. Cold for England, but no problem for a Finn.You’ve come to conduct the
Third Symphony at the invitation of the composer, Sir Granville Bantock, on behalf of the
Royal Philharmonic Society.You’re full of anticipation and feel greatly honoured.
‘It will be strange,’ you think, ‘to stand on the same podium where everyone
from Haydn to Tchaikovsky has conducted his own music.’
The Symphony is a new departure, more compact and athletic than your first two and the least selfquestioning of your seven. In Finland it’s been hailed as ‘sublime … revolutionary, new and truly Sibelian’.
But you’re anxious, understandably. The Second Symphony was a hard act to follow, not only because
of its spectacular success in Finland. When you conducted it in Berlin three years ago you became,
overnight, one of the most controversial names in German musical life. One critic said you were more
inventive than Richard Strauss; but could you sustain the achievement? Had you laid a foundation for
growth? They didn’t much like the Third in Russia, but you did have one distinguished listener.Young Sergei
Prokofiev was in the audience when you conducted it in St Petersburg. The next day he wrote a passage
for solo cello in an orchestration exercise for his teacher, Rimsky-Korsakov, who was not amused.
‘What’s this?’ asked Rimsky. ‘Why have you only one cello playing the melody?’
‘Because I don’t like it when all the cellos play together,’ said Prokofiev.
‘You don’t? Have you ever heard them?’
‘Yesterday,’ replied Prokofiev, ‘in Sibelius’s symphony.’
‘God in heaven,’ barked Rimsky. ‘Sibelius! Why listen to Sibelius?’
‘The new symphony has none of the character of this previously much respected and admired composer,’
wrote the music critic for the St Petersburg Herald. ‘Is it really possible that he has already written himself out?’
Galling, but just as usual: the people who write about the thing always think
they know better than the people who make the thing.You’re sure that with this
scrupulously concentrated music you have written yourself definitively in.
As you mingle with Londoners you wonder how a British audience will respond to the throaty mutter
of cellos and basses – eight of each – at the beginning of the Symphony and the way you turn up the
volume to make the music stride so quickly across space towards the listener.You know you’ve got an
exquisite trick up your sleeve in the gently rocking lilt of the slow movement before what you call the
‘crystallization of ideas from chaos’ in the finale. From a kaleidoscope of thematic hints you draw a
stately hymn-like tune into the foreground to carry the music into the C-major security of what Sir
Donald Tovey calls the Symphony’s ‘one and all-sufficing climax’. With classical economy you filter out
the prolixities of late Romanticism to make an essentially Romantic claim about the shaping power of
imagination. While you head for the City you’re unavoidably rehearsing. The music plays from your mind
to the winter air of England, bringing these bustling foreign streets into the kingdom of your big tune.

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Bantock, your best friend in Britain, wasn’t at the
station to meet you as intended because you’ve
taken an earlier train than planned. Eventually
he runs you to earth sitting comfortably in a
tea-shop at Oxford Circus. Musicians start to
play.You lay your hand on Bantock’s arm.
‘They are playing my Valse Triste,’ you say.
‘Isn’t it strange that it should be the first
music I hear on this visit to England?’
So you see, Sibelius, the Third Symphony and
Valse Triste intersected for you then in London as
they would for me 50 years later in Scotland.

two Sibelian spirits, father and son. And this is
why I’m asking you, Sibelius, to time-travel with
me into a sense of two lives which pay you
tribute because, though I didn’t know it until my
mother spoke as she did then about Valse Triste,
they both loved your music long before I did.
First we’ll meet Grandfather out for a Sunday stroll
in Glasgow and follow him to a railway junction near
the snow-bound city of Arbroath in the north-east
of Scotland in December 1906; then we’ll go to find
his son, my mother’s soldier, the uncle I never met,
in northern Greece and Macedonia, briefly visible
before passing ‘out of the sight of men’ on the World
War I battleground of the Salonika Front in 1917.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------‘It’s lovely, wise music,’ my mother said.
I knew my father was still too enthralled by his
recent discovery of your Second Symphony to be
ready, quite yet, for something new. His favourite hum
while shaving was the theme which propels the finale
of the symphony to the trumpet-tongued citadel of
its ending. So he was beginning every day on a high.
How grateful we were to you, Sibelius, for evicting
The Mikado, Jack Point and the Pirates of Penzance
from our master’s morning voice. Last night we’d
all listened to Brahms, but tonight he’d probably say,
‘Let’s have the Second’. No need to mention your
name: there was only one ‘Second’. This would mean
that after the dinner things were put away and the
dishes washed we’d make a semi-circle round the
record player – persistently, for us, still a ‘gramophone’
– and listen together in the tiny sitting-room as if
we were in a great yet exclusive concert hall with
Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra.
His initiation into the magic of Ex. 19 would have to
wait. So my missionary fervour fastened on my less
conservative mother. She listened in silence to the
newly acquired LP of Symphony Number 3 until I
lifted the pick-up at the end of the second movement.
‘A friend of Sibelius’s thought the tune
was like a child’s prayer,’ I said.
‘Yes, it’s lovely,’ she said again. ‘It begins on tiptoe,
like a child going into a room full of grown-ups.’
‘If it’s a prayer, why does he break up
the tune and seem to question it?’
‘He’s testing its strength,’ she said, ‘maybe
to see if it can hold its own with the grownups. It’s wistful and appealing, but there’s
acceptance as well. That’s a kind of strength.’
‘Will the prayer get an answer?’
‘It deserves to,’ she said. ‘It reminds me of Valse Triste.
That’s my favourite. I think it’ll always be my favourite.’
‘Why?’
‘Because of my father – your grandfather,’
she said, ‘and because of my soldier
brother, your uncle Marshall.’
So it happened that the spell of Ex. 19 raised

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On a hot Sunday afternoon in June 1906 John Marshall
Mitchell, wheat merchant, walks in the Glasgow park,
his wife, Isa, on his arm. They’re a handsome couple,
formally dressed because they’ve just come from
morning church. He’s a very tall man in his early fifties.
‘Your father’s six feet, pressed down and
running over,’ Isa would tell her children.
She is 10 years younger and almost a foot shorter.
John is solid, philosophically inclined and once laid a
wreath on the grave of Thomas Carlyle. She basks in
his security, but is disposed to be impish and is the one
person who knows how to make her husband unbend.
On Friday evenings the Mitchell family sings. The
upright piano, never quite in tune, is angled across
a corner of the living room at 211 West Princes
Street, Glasgow, left of the high bay window. The
three daughters line up in the bay with 12-year-old
big brother Marshall behind them to give a semblance
of bass under the girls’ quivery treble. John stands
in pride of place, in front of the piano where he can
keep an eye on his children and enjoy the sway of
Isa’s competent little body on the music stool as
her hands ripple across the keyboard, loud pedal
firmly down. There’s no sheet music on the stand:
Isa has her repertoire by heart and even Nora, the
youngest daughter, soon knows that proceedings
will begin with ‘Jock o’ Hazeldean’ and conclude
fortissimo with ‘Up with the Bonnets of Bonnie
Dundee’. Between the familiar Scottish songs there’ll
be Isa’s favourite snippets of Bach, Chopin and
Mendelssohn. John’s business requires him to travel
and he sometimes has to be away from home on
Friday. If so, he can be sure that the following week’s
concert will include 18th-century Jean Adam’s ‘There’s
nae luck aboot the hoose when oor gudeman’s
awa’. Isa will sing the first verse solo, then lead the
children into the chorus, glancing up archly across
the piano at her contentedly blushing husband:
And are ye sure the news is true?
And are ye sure he’s weel?

Is this a time to think o’ wark?
Ye jauds, fling by your wheel.
Is this a time to think o’wark,
When Colin’s at the door?
Rax me my cloak, I’ll to the quay,
And see him come ashore.
For there’s nae luck
aboot the hoose,
There’s nae luck at a’
There’s little pleasure
in the hoose,
When oor gudeman’s awa’.
When the sun shines in Scotland
you make the most of it. Scotland’s
a bit like Finland that way. On
this cloudless Sunday afternoon the broad lawns
of the park, sloping down to the River Kelvin,
have almost disappeared under a patchwork of
people. There are picnics, rolled-up shirt sleeves,
Italian ice-creams, children with skipping ropes and
bats and balls, cuddling sweethearts, improvised
newspaper hats to protect pale Scottish skins.
‘John, dear, will you not take off your
jacket, for you must be boiling?’ says
Isa who has removed the crocheted
black shawl she uses when she goes
to the draughty Presbyterian church
which always keeps its cool.
‘No thank you, my dear,’ answers
John, patting the watch in his waistcoat
pocket, ‘it’s still the Sabbath. All day.’
They walk towards the rotunda where a
brass band is pulverizing The Nutcracker Suite
with a surplus of tuba and trombone.
‘Doesn’t the Sugar Plum Fairy
sound grumpy!’ says Isa.
They find a postage-stamp of grass among the
picnickers. John’s Calvinist rectitude yields to chivalry.
He takes off his jacket and spreads it on the ground
for his wife to sit on – then, a little stiffly, joins her.
After gale-force selections from Carmen
the bandmaster turns to address his
inattentive audience of sun-worshippers.
‘We conclude our concert with an arrangement of
a new piece. It’s what you might call an atmospheric
waltz by the modern Finnish composer, Jean Sibelius.
The title is Valse Triste and we hope you’ll enjoy
it. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, and a very
good afternoon to you all on this glorious day.’
You can tell right away that the musicians have
been saving their best efforts for this daring, modern
finale. Feats of unbrazen delicacy are performed
on the gleaming, inappropriate instruments and
the main theme enters, just as it should, like a sigh.
John feels Isa’s response to the rhythm of the waltz
and slips his arm round her as she tucks her small
shoulder into his. They move discreetly together

as the music whirls to its peak
before the whispered farewell.
‘Oh, John, how strange and
beautiful,’ says Isa as he helps her
up from his rumpled jacket and
gives it a shake in which you might
detect Presbyterian admonition
for his Sabbath lapse into worldly
enjoyment. ‘What name did
he say for the composer?’
‘It sounded like an old Latin
name,’ John answers, ‘but he said the
composer comes from Finland.’
A few days later John brings Isa
the sheet music for Valse Triste in
a piano reduction. She practises
for a month, then includes it
in the family’s Friday programmes. It becomes a
hit with everyone, but especially with John.
---------------------------------------Now it’s the following December. We see John among
travellers in the railway station at Arbroath, stranded
by snow since early morning. They clap chilled hands
and stamp numbed feet on the platform. Their breath
sketches brief plumes of body air on the frigid haze.
Business has condemned John to the snow-bound
north-east, far from home, between Christmas and
New Year. Today is Friday the 28th. He’s in a bad
humour not only because he’s bitterly cold, like
everyone else, but because he’ll miss his cherished
evening at the piano with Isa and the children.
Roads are blocked by snow drifts up to 20
feet deep, telephones and telegraphs are out of
action and rail traffic is at a standstill because of a
derailment between Arbroath and Dundee. John’s next
appointment is in Dundee. After that he’ll go home.
Shortly after 3 pm, the Caledonian Railway Company’s
local train is ready to depart for Dundee. Its four
leading coaches are off the platform, so 50 passengers
scramble into the five carriages in the rear. John
climbs thankfully into the last carriage. The train
chugs tentatively into the falling snow, then comes
unexpectedly to a stop at Elliot Junction to allow
a northbound train to pass. There is desultory
conversation in the last carriage, enough to fog the
windows, blanking out the gunmetal North Sea on
one side of the track and the white-out of roads
and buildings on the other side. John thinks at home
it’ll soon be time for ‘Jock o’ Hazeldean’, Valse Triste
and his memory of summer happiness in the park.
Back in Arbroath, with the breakdown of normal
signalling procedures, it’s been decided to substitute
a primitive time-interval system to regulate the
movement of the trains. Fifteen minutes behind the
local for Dundee the long-delayed North British
Railway special has been demoted from ‘express’

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29

status because of the weather and left on its return
journey to Edinburgh in blinding snow. It’s running
tender first because Arbroath has no turntable big
enough to accommodate one of the company’s
biggest engines. The line should be clear by now but
twice the driver is stopped and cautioned about
what may lie ahead on the track. He has taken
‘something to keep the cold out’ before steaming
out of Arbroath station and picking up speed.
Sibelius, no composer has achieved so consummate
a mind of winter as you do in Tapiola, your last and
greatest symphonic poem. It’s an apotheosis of
unpeopled nature.Your music dematerialises us into
a zone of ice, snow, a wind of quintessential cold
remote from the nature in which we may find an
unequalled source of consolation and joy. The subzero dynamism of Finnish Northland may terrify us
– we may try to personify it down to the scale of
human malignity by using words like ‘hostile’, ‘savage’
or ‘brutal’ – but you understand that it’s purely and
impersonally itself, as far from considerations of
human reason or divine protection as the iceberg
that sank the Titanic, the tsunami that devastated
Aceh, the earthquake that killed 50,000 in Pakistan a
few months later or the snow that fell
on Arbroath and the Elliot railway
junction in December 1906.
The shock and thunder of collision
are simultaneous. Monstrously
exploding through the snow, the
North British locomotive crashes
into the stationary local at an
estimated speed of 30 miles an
hour. The last three carriages of the
local are impacted into a carcass
of splintered timbers and twisted
metal. The North British engine
mounts the wreckage and turns
over, its drive wheels still revolving.
The moaning of the injured begins.
Survivors from both trains start to
remove the dead and wounded from the debris and
medical help arrives from Arbroath in two special
engines. With the other 20 dead, John Mitchell is
laid out for identification in the waiting-room of the
junction’s little station, covered with a white sheet.
At 6.30 pm in the living room of 211 West Princes
Street Isa twirls the music stool to the height
she likes and smiles at her children. News of the
catastrophe doesn’t reach them until the grimly
formal messenger from the railway company rings
the door-bell next morning. This will be the last of
the Friday evenings, but not the end of music in the
Mitchell household. Now and for the rest of her
life, at any time of day, Isa may abruptly abandon
kitchen, laundry or conversation. She’ll go to the

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piano. There, we may suppose, she finds relief, an
outlet for controlled emotion and the solace of
memory in playing and singing from the familiar
repertoire. The children grow accustomed to these
impromptu recitals. Sometimes one of them will ask:
‘Mother, please, Valse Triste – for father?’
---------------------------------------My mother’s soldier’s name, like his father’s, is
John Marshall Mitchell. In a fashion of the time
he’s known to family and friends by his second
name. He’s promoted to full Lieutenant on 14
November 1916. He’s 22 and serving on the Salonika
Front with the 11th Battalion, The Cameronians
(Scottish Rifles). Compared to the Western Front,
Gallipoli and other theatres of war, the Salonika
Front was often considered a sideshow. The Allied
army was known back home as the ‘Gardeners
of Salonika’ due to the apparent lack of action.
‘If you want a holiday, go to
Salonika,’ people would say.
Before Salonika he has enlisted jauntily enough, like
thousands of patriotic young men; he has received a
short course in musketry and embarked for active
service in France. There he bivouacs in
fields and has his first taste of chaotic
trenches, shelling, comrades killed
by grenades and sniper-fire, and gas.
In November 1915 the Battalion
sails for Salonika on two ships, one
ironically called the RMS Arcadian,
the other, which carries 2/Lt Mitchell,
more appropriately named HMS
Terrible. After taking on coal at
Alexandria the Battalion leaves for
Salonika. They are escorted by HMS
Majestic. The scriptwriter is having
sport with the names of the shipping.
Weather is bad at Salonika. The
movement from quay to camp is a
story of rain, wind, tents in snow,
digging drains and latrines. The ground freezes and
is then heated to slush by a hot sun. Soldiers work
on the firing line, establishing gun emplacements.
Patrick Downey, a shell-shocked 19-year-old Private
of the 6th Battalion Leinster Regiment, refuses
to wear his cap and obey the order to fall in. His
division has been mauled at Gallipoli before being
transferred to Salonika where the men have been
forced to retreat in the face of Bulgarian attack, then
dumped for two days in a tented camp in freezing
mud. Downey is court-martialled and sentenced to
death. When he hears the sentence Downey laughs.
‘That’s a good joke,’ he says. ‘You let me enlist
and then bring me out here and shoot me.’
The Officer Commanding British Forces in
Greece doesn’t see the joke: ‘The condition of

discipline in the Battalion is such as to render
an exemplary punishment highly desirable.’
A few days before Christmas, Patrick
Downey is executed by firing squad.
Sibelius, looking out at the world from your beloved
Finland, you watch the gangsters of Europe murdering
their young. Is civilization coming to an end? You
brood on the twists and darknesses of the human
mind. ‘I fear that all the bitter conflicts that are in the
air will not resolve themselves only in war,’ you say.
‘Humanity’s hatred and wrath have frightening depths.’
From the windows of ‘Ainola’, your home at
Järvenpää near Helsinki, you see Russian troops
on the highway. ‘Our cross,’ you call them, winding
history back to the start of what your people call
‘The Great Hostility’, when the era of Swedish
power over Finland came to an end. It’s 1710. The
soldiers of the Tsar violate the Karelia, invading the
province of Viipuri. The ancient castle is besieged
and taken. ‘The dwellings are burned to the ground,
the people killed in the war. Mother Finland sits
in the snowdrifts with her shivering children.’ All
wars are the same for mothers and children.
On a personal level this war brings financial
distress. Regulations against products from enemy
countries mean that your German publisher,
Breitkopf und Härtel, can’t send you royalties.
‘My family needs money; think of the children!’ you
exclaim in your diary. ‘My German publisher cannot
send anything because of the war. How shall I manage?’
Luckily the London offices of Breitkopf und
Härtel are administered by neutral Swiss.Your
symphonies are out of bounds but Finlandia
and Valse Triste, your ‘greatest hits’, can still be
played in the wartime repertory of the Allies.
Lieutenant Mitchell is not especially musical, but
Friday evenings at home before Elliot Junction and
Isa’s impromptu recitals have installed in him a small
anthology of tunes which help to sustain him in the
trenches of the Salonika Front. Sibelius, your famous
waltz travelled to a tragic battlefield a long way
from both Finland and Scotland. No royalty was paid
either to you or to the soldier who took it with him
to Greece; but there was something much more
extraordinary, something, perhaps, miraculous.
---------------------------------------The Cameronians’ War Diary for 1916 mainly reports
‘situation normal’, which seems to mean ‘nil gains
and nil casualties’. In May the 12-pounder on HMS
Agamemnon brings down a Zeppelin said to have been
a present from the Kaiser to Ferdinand of Bulgaria.
There are practice advances, parades and polishings.
Cold, wet weather yields to spring warmth in April
1917. A field ambulance doctor is sniped through
the jaw while tending the wounded. A Transport

Officer shoots himself to kill his consciousness of
the madness. Mills grenades explode in the pockets
of two corpses, mutilating the feet of the soldiers
who tramped on them. Men go down with malaria.
Early May is dry and warm. The War Lords
telegraph each other injunctions, posturings, crosspurposes, accommodations. A Private shoots himself in
the foot while cleaning his rife. On 4th May Lieutenant
Marshall Mitchell writes his last letter home. It arrives
at 211 West Princes Street postmarked 8 May 1917, a
few hours before he passes ‘out of the sight of men’.
Stamped over the handwritten address is a triangle
enclosing the crown symbol and the message, ‘Passed
by Censor: No. 2223’. Presumably this indicates that
Marshall’s was letter number 2223 from this field post
office, not that the Allies had installed 2223 censors
to compound other lunacies of the Salonika Front.
It’s the letter of a devoted son and brother. He has
been man of the house for over 10 years, since
his father’s death in the snow at Elliot Junction.
He urges Isa to take care of herself and not
to overwork, his two older sisters to help her
and Nora to keep on with her swimming at the
baths for the good of her health. The rest of the
letter expresses acceptance of his circumstances
and his faith in a caring, almighty God:
We are still out of the trenches having a
quiet rest, and are appreciating it immensely.
The sun is frightfully hot during the day, but
at night it is fine and cool. We are wearing
sun helmets of course and need them
too for the heat is no joke at present.
I am keeping very fit and well, owing to our
present conditions which comprise plenty of
food and sleep, and my mind is at complete
rest in the knowledge that there’s still ‘luck
aboot the hoose’ and things are going on
happily and well in my home.You have no
idea, dear mother-of-mine, how that fact
cheers up a man under conditions similar
to those in which I am at present placed.
In your letters, dearest, you have always
appeared joyful and you have always
manifested a great faith that having one
common meeting-place, all would be
well … I pray to God that this faith may
accompany you always and that it may
be mine more and more. Be joyful and
place your burdens on the shoulder of
the Lord, and he will sustain thee, as he
does all who come to him. He has carried
me through unhurt hitherto, and if it
be his will he will continue to do so.
Thus you see it is not Valse Triste, but is
out of our human hands altogether.

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31

On 7 May the Battalion’s human hands prepare
equipment for moving into the line. Positions are
taken up in trenches on the west side of Lake Doiran.
The next day the enemy is bombarded, Bulgarian
batteries reply and the southern end of the lake is
lit by cascades of fire and flame. The effect is as if
lightning were striking each knoll repeatedly in a
freak storm. A mist drifts in from the lake, mingles
with the smoke of explosives and lies over the
gullies like a reeking cloud. At 21.45 two companies
of the Scottish Rifles move forward. They are soon
lost in the fog and out of radio contact. Lieutenant
Mitchell is in No. 2 Company. Senior officers peer
into the murk. At first they can be optimistic: in the
glare of searchlights soldiers appear to be scrambling
into enemy trenches. Then the fog takes over and
there is only the thump of the big guns, the crackle
of rifle-fire, distant cries and the whine of shells.
At about 2.15 on the morning of 9 May a Captain
of No. 2 Company makes it back to Battalion HQ.
He had entered Bulgarian trenches with part of his
Company but they had been bombed
out. Among the three missing officers
is Lieutenant Mitchell. Patrols sent out
by the Royal Scots Fusiliers report that
they can find no trace of the companies
of the Scottish Rifles which had gone
forward to the assault. In a day or two
‘Missing’ proves to be circumlocution
for killed. Marshall Mitchell won’t
be going home to be man of the
house for his ‘mother-of-mine’ and
sisters at 211 West Princes Street.
His holiday in Salonika is finished.
God’s will is clear on that point.
In due time Isa receives notification
of the death of her son. She also
receives an envelope containing his
service medals, none suggesting any distinction.
There isn’t much scope for witnessed military
distinction when you’re despatched into fog. There’s
a citation from His Majesty’s Government, what
we would call a form letter. It presents its fulsome
patriotic phrases in elegant printed calligraphy. At
the end of the innumerably copied scroll a clerk
has written the name in blood-red ink: ‘Lieut. John
Marshall Mitchell, Scottish Rifles’. The citation says:
He whom this scroll commemorates was
numbered among those who, at the call of
King and Country, left all that was dear to
them, endured hardness, faced danger, and
finally passed out of the sight of men by the
path of duty and self-sacrifice, giving up their
own lives that others might live in freedom.
Let those who come after see to it
that his name be not forgotten.

32

the drouth

---------------------------------------Sibelius, what ideas can be crystallized from
this delirium of bullets and lies? Can there be a
kingdom of the big tune only in the dream-world
of the artist? Is the Third Symphony an aesthetic
fiction, a whistle in the dark? Could its ‘one and
all-sufficing climax’ take away the pain from Isa
and her daughters? Is your popular, sad waltz
closer to the truth than the élitist eloquence of
the Symphony? Can the child’s prayer hold its own
with the grown-ups? Does it ever get an answer?
And what are we to make of Marshall’s last letter?
Is it unambiguously the letter of a patriot and
Christian, a conformist who obeyed orders and went
unquestioningly into battle for King and Country,
grateful for the issue of sun helmets, food and sleep,
readily surrendering his life to the judgement of
his Battalion commander and the will of his God
and dutifully signing off his loving but rather formal
message with ‘I have some Platoon
work to do this afternoon, which
won’t bear delaying any longer’?
If he could have written letter
No. 2223 without the inhibition
of censorship, would he have
written differently? Would he have
mentioned the fate of luckless
Patrick Downey or the Transport
Officer’s lonely suicide, or the feet
shattered by Mills grenades in the
pockets of dead comrades? Or
would the letter have remained
much the same because as man
of the house his obligation is to
comfort and reassure his widowed
mother and three sisters? Is his
reference to Valse Triste a coded
way of telling them he expects to die soon but they
should be calm because he’s prepared for this and
not afraid? When he passed from the sight of men in
the reek of mist and explosives, when the Bulgarian
shell or bayonet found him – or when he was caught
in the obscene euphemism, ‘friendly fire’ – was
there an atomic instant of epiphany when he saw
the faces of home or felt the succour of his God?
Or was it not like that at all? Did death come with
spectral tenderness, not the big tune but Valse
Triste after all, taking him in its arms, dancing him
away from the mockery of earthly perversities?
And who would grossly question sister Nora’s
memory of his last valediction? His service medals
have been buried with the Government’s glib citation
in a drawer of the sideboard used as a dumping
ground for lifeless memorabilia. She sits alone in the
blank inertia of bereavement while the half-light of

dusk gathers in the living room at 211 West Princes
Street. At the side of the bay window, to the right of
the piano, he stands erect, crisply uniformed, capped
and gloved as if ready for inspection or like a sentry
on guard. There is no movement in his face but the
eyes beckon. She rises from her chair and walks to
him as the waltz begins its gravely spaced pizzicato
chords and he raises his arms towards her. She can
feel his hand through the leather glove and caresses
his cheek with her own. His right hand on her waist
guides her into the quickening spiral of the dance. Her
feet are nimble, her heart sings and the room spins.
Light fades with the dying fall of the music and heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s
gone. She sits again, at peace in the darkened room,
her hand still conscious of his, her feet remembering.